NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W hen the GOP presidential-primary debate turned to the topic of abortion last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said: “We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.”
Jen Psaki, the former Biden White House press secretary who now hosts a show on MSNBC, responded to DeSantis and other GOP candidates by writing on Twitter: “No one supports abortion up until birth.” Over the weekend, Psaki devoted a segment of her show to argue that the claim that Democrats support legal abortion until birth is “entirely misleading.” Psaki concluded the segment by declaring that late-term abortions are “almost always the result of a devastating choice to save the life of the mother or because a baby that a couple desperately wanted cannot survive outside the womb.” But Psaki’s claim simply isn’t true.
Contrary to the former White House press secretary’s assertion, a majority of late-term abortions kill the physically healthy babies of physically healthy mothers. Although a baby born at 21 weeks of pregnancy has survived his stay in the neonatal-intensive-care unit, “data suggest that most” abortions performed between weeks 20 and 28 of pregnancy are not performed for “reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment,” according to a 2013 study. (“Little is known about the relatively few abortions occurring in the third trimester,” the same authors reported.) The Atlantic recently profiled Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado abortionist who performs only late-term abortions — killing premature infants in the womb who are “who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along.” Hern admitted that most of the abortions he performs later than 21 weeks target healthy babies of healthy mothers: “Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses” (emphasis added). While a baby can be delivered alive in a matter of hours or minutes, the late-term-abortion procedure that Hern performs “takes three or four days,” so it is not a method necessary for saving the life of the mother when the child can clearly survive outside the womb.
The odd thing about Psaki’s false assertion that late-term abortions are “almost always” performed when the baby could not survive after birth or to save the life of the mother is that during her TV segment she quoted the same Colorado abortionist, who said to the Washington Post: “In an average week at my office, 25 to 50 percent of the patients have some serious, catastrophic fetal abnormality, and there are some weeks in which this is true for 100 percent of the patients.” In other words, in an “average week,” 50 percent to 75 percent of the viable babies he kills with a poison-filled syringe are physically healthy.
President Biden and Senate Democrats do not favor making those elective late-term abortions illegal at the federal or state level. With the exception of Joe Manchin, they all support a federal bill that makes abortion beyond viability and until birth legal whenever a lone “health-care provider” — a term not limited to doctors — determines that killing the viable baby would protect the mental health of the mother. The Washington Post fact-checker observed that German abortion law limits abortion to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy only “on paper,” but “in reality” abortion is allowed there until 24 weeks because of a mental-health exception. Many blue states in the U.S. have such a mental-health loophole in their laws that allows abortion until birth, but seven states and the District of Columbia don’t even try to paper over the fact that they allow abortion for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy.
Psaki tries to minimize the horror of late-term abortions by calling them “incredibly rare.” According to the Guttmacher Institute, which favors an expansive right to abortion, there are 930,000 abortions performed annually, and 1.3 percent of abortions are performed at 21 weeks or later. That equals about 12,000 late-term abortions a year. The worst year of school shootings in American history claimed the lives of 34 children.
The proper question is not whether elective late-term abortions are a small percentage of all abortions but whether they are morally distinguishable from the infanticides committed by Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. If they aren’t morally different, then why do Jen Psaki and other prominent Democrats think elective late-term abortions should be legal?